In the area of marketing, displays and designs have been widely used on many products to increase the appeal of the products and thereby make the products more attractive to potential purchasers. For example, fanciful displays and designs have been used for many years on greeting cards, packaging, decals, and the like to enhance the appeal of these products.
Just one of the many types of displays which are commonly used are displays which have a transparent plastic substrate on which a design is formed. As can be readily appreciated, even for this particular type of display there are a large number of different techniques which can be used for forming the desired design on the plastic substrate. Of particular importance to the present invention is the technique known as process printing, of which lithographic process printing and silk screen printing are well-known species.
In its most basic sense, process printing involves forming an image on a substrate by depositing a large number of very small, closely-spaced colored dots onto the substrate. Each of the dots is colored one of the four primary colors, i.e., red, blue, yellow, or black. The desired image is formed on the substrate by selectively depositing the variously colored dots onto the substrate in a predetermined pattern, i.e., a predetermined color combination. This pattern or combination in which the dots are deposited forms the desired image and also establishes the colors of the image.
Typically, when an image is to be formed on a plastic substrate for use as a clothing label, packaging, and the like, the dots are translucent ink and are process printed onto the substrate. It happens, however, that when process printed onto a plastic substrate, the image has a two-dimensional, flat appearance.
The present invention recognizes that the effect of process printed displays can be enhanced by making portions of the display appear metallic and shiny to thereby give the display an apparent three-dimensional appearance and enhance the appeal (and thus the effectiveness) of the display.
Accordingly, it is an object of the present invention to provide a display which uses a plastic substrate with an image process printed thereon that has a three-dimensional quality in its appearance. It is a further object of the present invention to provide a display which has a process printed image wherein portions of the image have a metallic, shiny appearance to provide different textured qualities for the image. Another object of the present invention is to provide a display which has diverse applications and which is cost effective to manufacture.